Explainer

Suppose an African leader is coming to New York to address the United Nations, and an interpreter there overhears someone plotting his assassination and informs the police. So maybe the leader should just stay home? He can’t. Because he is a murderous dictator (the interpreter’s family was among his victims), the Security Council will probably ask the International Criminal Court to investigate him for genocide. So the speech might help him out of the jam. Get it?

If that’s the plot of a movie, audiences might have trouble keeping up. If you were the director of the movie, you’d need to figure out a way to clarify things. The late Sydney Pollack found himself in just such a fix in 2004, when his movie “The Interpreter” was leaving test audiences befuddled. How did he get out of the jam?

He called Pat Kiernan, the forty-three-year-old Canadian anchorman on NY1, and the go-to man for directors who need a newscaster to explain a knotty plot point to moviegoers. Since 2001, Kiernan has played himself a dozen times, in episodes of “Law & Order” and in movies such as the new “Avengers.” The other day, he took a break from the real news—brush fire in Staten Island, murder trial in Manhattan—to tape a scene for the season finale of NBC’s “30 Rock,” which will air this Thursday.

Sitting in the greenroom at the NY1 studio, in Chelsea, Kiernan said that with “The Interpreter,” “months after they finished the principal photography, Sydney Pollack flew to New York, just to shoot me standing in front of the U.N. Building. They needed this one scene to explain who this African dictator was.”

Or there was the time when “Night at the Museum 2” needed Kiernan to spell out why, besides box-office potential, there was a second movie at all. (Museum closes for renovations, sends exhibits to the Smithsonian.) “They put me in front of a green screen in Los Angeles, so they could project me in front of the Museum of Natural History, which is three blocks from where I live,” he said. Then it turned out that the cameras malfunctioned, so his scene was cut.

The “30 Rock” shoot didn’t require any travel. He could record the scene at his anchor’s desk and send the tape over to NBC. But first he had to do a segment with Joya Dass, a business reporter at the New York Stock Exchange. Cameras rolled, and Kiernan and Dass discussed Alcoa earnings, Kodak layoffs, consumer confidence, and Facebook’s billion-dollar purchase of Instagram.

“Do you know what Instagram is?” Dass asked, trying to catch her technoskeptical colleague off guard.

“I know what it is,” Kiernan said, then noted that “this five-hundred-and-fifty-one-day-old company is worth a billion dollars, and the New York Times, at a hundred and thirty-odd years, is worth, like, nine hundred million, according to the stock market.” Outrage expressed, Kiernan began to fix his makeup for “30 Rock.”

“There’s a lot of acting in what I do,” he said, as he smoothed his hair and straightened a flowered necktie. “You have to be the same person every day, regardless of how you feel. And you have to have the vocal energy to convey the news, and the range to go from a serious story to a not-so-serious story.”

For “30 Rock,” Kiernan would be reading a serious story. In the control room, producers patched in Matt Hubbard, who wrote the episode, and had called in to listen to Kiernan’s performance. “He delivers an absolutely critical piece of information,” Hubbard said. “He is probably the catalyst for Liz Lemon”—the show’s romantically hapless protagonist, played by Tina Fey—“finding love.”

On the set, Kiernan read from a teleprompter: “An otherwise quiet Queens neighborhood was stunned today by a daring daylight heist. Police are reporting that a bank on Jackson Avenue was robbed this afternoon, by a lone suspect, a white male in his thirties.”

Kiernan did twelve takes, alternating between light and sombre reads, pronouncing “daring daylight heist” in a brisk newsman’s staccato. Afterward, he asked Hubbard how it had gone.

“You did break a rule that I have about the word ‘suspect,’ but I didn’t want to interfere,” Kiernan said. Until the police provide a name, “suspect” is off limits, he explained. Done with the day’s fake news, he turned back to the teleprompter. There were developments in an investigation into another fire, in the Bronx, and there was a new exhibition about the Titanic, at the South Street Seaport. It took three takes to get it right. ♦